In honor of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic first manned mission into the great beyond... Chop Shop's newest iconic tshirt was released today featuring 23 historic missions of mankind's exploration of Earth and space. Missions starting with Sputnik -- leading to Yuri Gagarin's first manned mission expanding to today's permanently manned International Space Station.

The design itself also includes unmanned missions like Sputnik, Hubble as well as missions inhabited by species other than human. A spiraling timeline weaves the missions together and is numbered with significant years of progress. Pre-Order it for Men on American Apparel’s Black, Navy or on Alstyle Black and for Women on American Apparel Black. Look for a children’s version in a few weeks as well.

Robotic and human missions of exploration that extended beyond the Earth’s orbit. 23 historic missions in total (with an additional 6 separations) that are recognized for their notable achievements to various celestial bodies in our solar system with targets including the Sun, planets and their moons, comets and asteroids. Nearly every icon represents a specific robotic explorer (or series) with the exception of the Apollo program which continues to be the single human endeavor to ever go beyond the cradle.

If you buy a copy we will donate $5 of every purchase to The Planetary Society. The world’s largest space-interest group dedicated to inspiring the public with the adventure and mystery of space exploration. A non-governmental organization founded in 1980, who among its founders included Carl Sagan, the author of Cosmos.

If you buy a copywith a membership (sorry, US residents only), we will register you as a new member for only an additional $25 (normally $37). See here for what you get as a new member.

In case readers of this blog are not aware, our main gig in life is running a design studio called Chopping Block and a (mostly) t-shirts shop called Chop Shop. In an effort to increase the amount of awesome design featuring space exploration, we have been posting the work of other artists here and now we have decided to officially join the ranks by releasing some of space related work of our very own starting with our A Good Idea tshirt.

Friend of the Chop, Matthew Borgatti, made this cosmonaut lamp a while back and it made it’s way around the web as clever things often do. We asked Matthew to convert it into a drawing so we could display his concept on chests the world over. The title is a play on a famous graphic design slogan, “design is a good idea”. Our point-of-view is that space exploration is a good idea as well.

I had really always thought it would be so cool to do a poster set with great design for each of the planets. I actually started a design for the Cassini at Saturn mission, but have yet to complete it. Sure enough someone comes along and knocks the whole system out in one fantastic series. Beat me to it!

The funny thing about doing the whole Solar System is that you will not likely have too many takers for Uranus or even Pluto. But the design on some of these makes it pretty tempting to grab just for the overall design. I can’t wait to email Ross when New Horizons gets to Pluto and it looks nothing like what is shown here. A gorgeous inclusion of the hypothetical ring some expect to find when we get there, but where are the 3 moons?

I would be a fool to not include Saturn. The exclusion of the Galileans at Jupiter, no Charon on the Pluto poster and the absence of Titan here on the Saturn poster... I wonder if I sense a moon series coming? Put me down for a copy of Io.

Admit it, deep down inside we (or at least I) all secretly want to explore the heavens untethered from the Earth and unlock all the mysteries of the universe. Perhaps that is why the beautiful info-graphic art of Michael Paukner is so appealing. His work focuses on many scientific themes such as space exploration, as seen in this poster of the Solar System as it is known today (above), to more conspiratorial "junk science" theories like numerology, the Doomsday Planet (follows the link) and that crazy Aztec calendar that ends in 2012.

My impression is that much of the latter work is for fun and the themes provide for some really engaging imagery. These (and a few other images) are available from his site in poster form (for those of you with barren walls begging for inspiration).

Click above to see Michael’s info-graphic on how an eclipse works. This has to be the most attractive depiction of this phenomenon ever attempted. If you want to see more of his work apart from what is on sale at his site, you need to check out this set in his flickr feed which includes some of his more bizarre designs.

If happen to come to own one of these bad boys from the late 60’s early 70’s you are going to need this owners manual. The original owners of these models rarely have this on-hand. If you are in the market, beware of any models from the 13 line since that model had a well-known faulty oxygen tank that is likely to scrub any potential trips to the Lunar surface you may have planned. Get it from Haynes online.

Download this pdf to check out these soon to be produced desktop globes of Jupiter’s moons and contact them about any interest in buying them here. These are cardboard-substrate globes on simple plastic bases, but they still look pretty cool. Even at the high price of $300 (a pre-production estimate) – I have to say that I am pretty tempted.

The weRobot tee posted here a few weeks ago has taken over my life here at wanderingspace. For anyone not aware, my real day job is running The Chopping Block and Chop Shop out of New York City. We were at the NY Comic Con over the weekend and while there Gizmodo and Boing Boing both posted our robots tee and we were slammed by traffic. So space has had to take a back seat for the last week or so.
More appropriate for this forum perhaps is the more recent alienWe tee we just released on the temp site (yes, we are still recuperating from the server load). Take a look and if you like, mosey on over to the order form.

We posted this tee available for sale at redbubble.com that borrows from the old NASA logo to create this visual play on words. The quality above looks a bit low, but see the link for a better representation.
This is the second tee we are posting here and due to a simple address error, we have not received either product to do a review. Once that happens we will post.

One day wanderinspace.net expects to release a poster celebrating the Cassini mission. In the meantime, there is this tee available for sale at redbubble.com that features the Cassini spacecraft which will be featured in that design.

We just ordered one and it hasn’t come in yet. So we don’t know how the printing quality will be… we cannot vouch for that as of this time. But the site does offer that they come on American Apparel tees available for in men and women’s sizes, which are known to be top quality tees. When the purchase arrives here at wanderingspace control center, we will offer an update.

My day job makes wicked cool tees for designers, nerds, geeks, centaurs, graphic artists, computer freaks, tech-dorks, fools and kings. Prices have been a cheap $15-17 for the first 3 months of operation, now we are moving the prices up to the still low price of $20-22. So get some now before its costs more!
read more | digg story

My full time company (unrelated to space interests) has launched its “shop” and is sporting a bunch of tees and designs aimed at computer nerds, designers, illustrators and nerds in general. While I don’t have any directly space related designs up there (yet), there is a poster we did for an event I spoke at does feature me as a robot surrounded by a few moons. You may even recognize one as slightly Mimas looking and the other a bit Europan. The other two are just your generic cratered looking ice balls.

I have been getting tons of comments lately about Cialis and Mortgages and deleting them as they come in. If anyone on here is looking for that I can forward them on to you. I know how common it is for people surfing space related subject are often also seeking deals on cialis, mortgages and especially diapers.